That’s a very generous offer. Any reply other than “Thank you for doing this” seems a bit mean.
However: I think it’s a pity that the challenge is purely for number of games - which means that the people taking it up will be playing very fast games. I find that I don’t improve if I only play fast games, so I always play 30-min plus 5x30sec byoyomi on KGS (or 10min for 25 stones on Pandanet). I suspect that I’m going to find it more difficult to get games on KGS in February …
OTOH I’m only 7k/6k so I’m not one of the people this challenge is aimed at, so maybe it doesn’t matter if I migrate to Pandanet for the whole month.
I second this proposal of playing 100 games to earn a raffle ticket for prizes, and x number above that for additional tickets. It should keep many more people playing through to the end of the month. The raffle prizes could be $25 each, with a $50 bonus for the most, for example.
It might and mightn’t work better with the raffle version.
I can see myself being more incentivised to try hit 100 games as others have said with such a raffle version. So maybe in one way it might encourage more people (and maybe a broader range) to try for it who wouldn’t otherwise.
Then again you might want to average 4 games a day to achieve it (rounding 3.5 ish up, then maybe more if you miss a day here and there). It would pretty much have to be blitz games for me still, I tend to like trying to review my games afterward, and I’d say four long games would be hard to fit in. This might already put people off as much as just trying to play the most games, although it does sound more attainable of course.
Then again, with gaining something like one extra ticket per 50 games or something like that, I doubt the payoff in percentage chance to win will be worth the extra number of games put in. (I’d have to make some guesstimates on numbers of players achieving 100 games to figure it out). It’s hard to say what x number would make it worthwhile.
I think no matter the choice too, there will be people immovable in their will to play on other larger servers with lots of strong players and styles.
I’m curious has this contest interested any of the 1-6d in the Egf we’ve seen at the recent tournaments hosted on OGS (Women’s tournament, Grand Prix etc) for example. It seemed like some players would have account much lower than their Egf rating on OGS or had to make new/unrated accounts for the tournament.
For me, the main problem with KGS is its “escaper friendly” policy. Somebody who just wants to get a better rank can leave a game he’s losing, and if he/she doesn’t do this too often, the game will never be counted as a loss for him/her. This is extremely annoying for the other player.
OGS and IGS both do the sensible thing - give the leaver 5 minutes to reconnect, in case it was just a lost connection/computer crash, and if they don’t come back in 5 mins, they lose the game.
I like that KGS offers a different policy for disconnections. I think that punishing disconnections is discriminating against people with unstable internet connections, which may be quite common in large parts of the world.
Off topic, but KGS allows 1 escaped game for every 10 legit ranked losses, with a max of 10 unfinished games. I don’t think that’s too many, given that someone may experience that frequency of internet interruptions. Here’s the policy:
The goal of the server is not to punish anybody. It is to make sure that you can adjourn a game from time to time with no problem, and also to make sure that players who walk away from lost games are counted as resigning them. To perform that goal, every time that you are the first player to leave a rated unfinished game1, the server will put you into one of three groups:
Most people will be non-escapers. When you leave the game, it is marked as adjourned, and you can finish it later with no penalty. You are marked as the escaper for this game, but the mark is not visible to anybody and it will do you no harm; when the two players resume the game later, the mark is removed. Additionally, after 6 months, the game is dropped from the server’s memory and the mark erased.
If you already have some escaped games, you may be forced to forfeit your oldest escaped game. This will happen if you have 5 escaper marks, and you have fewer than 10 legitimate losses for each escape. Only losses are considered because people who walk away from lost games are escapers. The system doesn’t allow more than 10 pending escaped games.
If you have several forfeits already, you may be considered a chronic escaper. In that case, all your escaped games will be forfeited immediately, including the game you just left. If you have 10 forfeits already, then any new game will be instantly forfeited.
Note that only ranked games are considered for escapers. Escaping from an unranked game is considered to be an impolite way of saying “I resign.”
Well, I’d like to put my money where my mouth is. You can consider Store.Baduk.Club a sponsor if you want to, and I’ll create a 5% discount code for the month of March for anyone that hits 100 in the month of February. If you’ll be confirming the results, I can give you that code to distribute.
Do they have to start within the month too? For example, if I start a game January 15, and end the game in February 15, will this count toward my total?
Not trying to game the system, I just have a lot of corr games going right now >.<
Haha! I’ve not played much blitz before, especially 19x19 blitz, so I’ve been warming up for this challenge. Woah! It’s so intense! I think I’m already addicted to the buzz. So thanks already @Clossius1
@Clossius, can you confirm that Corr games started before February will count? And how are games tracked generally? Will players just report their numbers at the end of the month?
